I lied and spent a good chunk of the last two days in the kitchen. Thursday was Hil’s birthday and we were still in lockdown. I thought about taking her for a little picnic up in the hills, along a little creek, around sunset and having a fire. Maybe pulling out some fine, stinky cheese, a baguette and a bottle wine. But that wasn’t such a good idea, because we would have been shot.

I think that it is very common to have that desire of not getting shot on your birthday. I don’t know who you roll with, but even when my friends are down their luck and all that, they don’t want to get shot. I guess I don’t hang out with any goths, but I doubt they’d be into it. Something about it not being romantic enough. I think they’d rather get stabbed, no, sliced a few times while doing some sort of fetish thing with the apple from a roasted pig’s mouth. I’m glad Hilary isn’t a goth.

Did I ever mention that there are a bunch of albino kids in this part of the world? There are two running around outside right now, watering a house that is being built. I think there are about five in the neighborhood. Pakistan had a bunch too. Scrawny whitey, white kids going all around. One here, the little one, looks like he gets beat up a lot. The biggest one, he looks like, hmmm…weird, for one. I can’t quite place it. Maybe he looks like he is trying to be a forest ranger. Being in the desert doesn’t work with that. If they come back around the corner I’ll take a picture. I hope the flash doesn’t hurt their skin, but serious…what the hell are they thinking living in a desert?! A desert is no place with the melanoma-challenged albinos! They should be in caves five feet under the ground where it is safe! In eight years I bet they’ll end up being a walking scab of skin cancer! Perhaps their paleness somehow protects them from the sun’s dangerous rays? I ain’t ever seen an albino kid in a forest, or in Canada, not even in Germany where you’d think they’d be popular and get all the ladies. The only one I ever knew was some kid named Chris Waters or something in 6th grade, and I don’t think he was an albino even though I called him that. Someone else called me an albino in that class too, and all I could do was point to him and say he was whiter than I was and I was off the leash. It always feels so good to have someone around who is worse off than yourself.

Okay, bringing it back to Hil’s birthday, and eventually cooking, since I couldn’t do anything else I made her a cake. A small one, just for her (um, and I was hoping for half of it). Another woman here was making her a hefty amount of carrot cake, doing it up all proper at work. I, however, was going for the subtle approach, and didn’t want to have no sort of cake competition or nothing.

Chocolate cakes in Iraq are no easy task. For days I searched online for a recipe to base things off of, but by the time I got to the end of every recipe, I had no more than two of the ingredients: flour and sugar. I thought about toss those into a bowl and heating them up and stick a spoon in it, handing it to Hilary and saying “happy birthday” but I tried a little harder. Still being in lockdown did not make things any easier. No butter, no margarine, (weird, I just noticed that the albino kids all dress alike! Village of the Damned-Style!) no semi-sweet chocolate, no bittersweet chocolate, no baking chocolate, no almond extract, you name it, and I did not have it. Oscar advised chocolate milk and flour, which I nearly followed him up on before it donned on me that I can’t get chocolate milk here, and I can hardly get milk. Eventually, I came across a recipe for Rheine de Saba. Not only did it like I would have to use minimal substitutions, but it was what I was looking for: moist, dense, and chocolaty.

Thursday morning, I feigned sickness, and after Hilary left I went back to sleep for a little bit then headed to the kitchen. My goal of the day was that cake and bread dough. I got the cake all together, using mass amounts of Crisco, omitted the almond extract, and regrettably the pulverized almonds because someone ate or disappeared my two kilos worth. Everything flew together, and the only hurdle was getting the egg whites to peak. I had to beat that stuff like I was Bob Dole back in the day (pre blue pill). After a very long time, I just gave up and added it all together, baked it, pulled it out abut two minutes later than I should (I cooked the center), and set it aside to cool under an air conditioner as I got the icing together. I also realized that the lunch cook had knocked over my cup of frosting in the refrigerator, but I was in good spirits at that time and whipped another batch together. The payoff to another batch was that I had to pull out the bottle of rum, and it being 2:30pm by that time, well, I did have to indulge in a little bit of cane goodness.










Mixed in with getting the cake ready I was prepping my sourdough. At 10:30am I set three portions of starter to do their final refreshing before making dough. When the time was right (3pm I think) I added more flour and water to get the bulk fermentation going, and then went back to the cake. It had cooled enough to put it in the refrigerator to get nice a cold, so I could do a quality frosting/icing job. I sketched a few possibilities, then came up with the design I wanted to make on the cake. Simple, not elaborate, and achievable for my first time decorating a cake. Everything was turning out grand. All I needed was pastry bag to squeeze the icing out of, which of course I did not have. No bag like objects, anywhere. The only similar items were fat to precious to use (HA! Big albino kid just hosed little albino kid and now he looks like he’s pouting. Damn, those kids need hats, and capes. Capes might protect them from the UVs). Eventually, I settled on some plastic wrap which I could easily make into a bag.


The time eventually came when I was to knead the dough. I added salt to retard the fermentation and starting banging away on it, pulling it, jabbing it, and just beating the crap out of it. It was a lot of fun. Milkfat, the token gay guy here, was in the kitchen too making dinner, and I co-opted him into helping. I think he enjoyed it, but I think he might have some S&M fetishes he was interested in playing out. Regardless, I was happy to have his assistance. He could really bang that dough hard. The dough was kneaded; bannetons were built out of cardboard boxes, my sarong, and toothpicks. In went the dough.

I went back to the birthday cake – it was time to decorate. I slathered on some dark chocolate frosting, smoothed it out nicely, but the ambient temperature was already causing it to droop off the sides. Then came the fancy decorating: the text and the diagonal lines, using the icing from my plastic wrap pastry bags.

Plastic wrap does not make a good pastry bag. My first gentle squeeze caused the bag to rip wide open. The plastic wrap just wasn’t going to work. Not having anything better, I used the one plastic bag in the entire place, which was dirty and had been containing carrots. Knowing that people who pick produce also tend to crap in the fields (seriously, you would too), I turned the bag inside out so any dysentery tainted poop on the carrots would not get on my icing and make it ugly. Besides, plastic bags are used to keep the dirt that is on your produce form getting on other things, right? Therefore, the outside of the bag was the cleanest! In went the frosting, I twisted it shut, cut off a small corner, and gently squeezed again. And again it ripped, some, but a 1” wide channel was better than nothing. Any of the fancy work was out the window, so I did it up quick.

I was already a few minutes late to Milkfat’s going away dinner and party, so I got my cake and ran home (where I knew Hil was). Sliced up two pieces, took it up stairs, and gave her some cake. Ate some more after the party, and then some for breakfast too. It was really good, even if there were Crisco chunks in the frosting.

The next afternoon it was time to bake my bread. It hadn’t risen much the night before, and the outside had a sort of shell on it. I’d been reading about brick and masonry ovens recently, so I wanted to try to replicate the effects of it. A lot of folks online recommend using a pizza stone or some masonry tile in your oven to replicate the irradiating effects of a stone oven. The best I had were some cinder blocks outside. This was probably not my best solution to a minor issue. No, it was not. It was definitely not after I decided to add two very heavy cinder blocks to the bottom of the oven. If anyone tried to disprove me on this, I’m sorry, but you are an idiot.

After warming up the oven to the highest temperature possible (maybe 350?), I put my three pretty loaves of bread in. Oh, how excited I was at that point! They were in the oven for about 20 minutes. I was in the other room watching a terrible, terrible movie. Then there was a loud crash involving metal and a heavy thud. I just about ignored it, but Hil jumped up knowing better.

Yes, I dropped cinder blocks through the bottom of the oven. Two cinder blocks, and they were very heavy. In the fall, the burner became dislodged, and the flame went out. My bread was fine though, which I was happy to see. Using the two crappy hot pads in the kitchen, I carried the 45+ pound cinder blocks outside, in a running fashion because they were very hot, and threw them onto the grass. This was after it took 10 minutes to extract them from the very hot oven. I pulled out the bottom of the oven, which was now bent, and moved it aside, then knocked the burner around so it looked the way it should. I tested it, and it lit again. Thinking that was good enough, I man handled the oven bottom back into place and put the bread back in for another 20 minutes.

20 minutes turned into about an hour. When I finally pulled them out, they looked really weird. The crust was a grayish green. I figured it was from the flour I dusted the tops with, and that had just burnt. No big deal, I could wipe it off later. They hadn’t raised much, but everything seemed to be good.

Hilary then put some cookies in the oven. When those were done, she pulled them out and mentioned that something was wrong because her cookies were ugly. It looked like soot to me, from my burnt flour. We did some more thinking about it, some research on the internet, and then came to the conclusion that I had broken the oven. The oven flames were a nice yellow/orange, and tall. If your oven flames are this color, you will die from carbon monoxide poisoning.

Back into the stove I went, to try to tinker it back into working. Turns out that the whole thing was jury rigged together in the first place with a wood screw, and works about the same as a carb on one of those weed-smoking pipes. It is just a little harder to move around a burning piece of metal to establish the right color and height of the flames. After maybe an hour or so, I declared it fixed. I was also covered in black soot.

Don’t do something stupid and put cinder blocks in your oven. That is a stupid, stupid idea.

My bread however, looked like ugly bread. Using the bread knife, one of the best knives in the kitchen, it took about 45 seconds to cut through the crust. This was primarily the knife’s fault. The inside looked good, but my bread had not risen. I could still see the folds from the final shaping, and there weren’t any air spaces. It tasted like bread. It was also weighed about 6 pounds per loaf.

I took pictures of them, and then threw them away. I am not yet completely raw. But here's a picture of the albino kids. Enjoy it.